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The popular Source games Half Life 2 and Portal have officially been ported to Android for $10 each, however at the moment the games are only supported on the Nvidia Shield. NVIDIA themselves have taken care of the port in-house.

Today, Valve Software and Nvidia launched ports of classic PC games Half-Life 2 and Portal on the portable, Android-backed Nvidia Shield game system. The launch follows a partnership announcement from the two companies in March, and while the original, announced plan was for Portal to launch by itself, Half-Life 2 showed up on the Google Play store today as well.

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I assume this Shield-only support is temporary, however, since there is no touch control available at all on the games yet. As a Shield owner, I'm quite happy with these releases. I've yet to officially play them and I'll probably make a post in this thread or somewhere else with my thoughts on it later.

I thought the whole point of the Shield was to stream PC games, wouldn't standalone ports kind of undermine that capability a bit ?

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Streaming is all nice and dandy but native support always beats a stream. I'd say it's exciting to see Source ported over to Android, it's about time mobile platforms got to enjoy some of the major PC releases of the decade. Who knows, maybe other Source titles like Left 4 Dead or Counter Strike will follow? Everything depends on how these two will sell.

I thought the whole point of the Shield was to stream PC games, wouldn't standalone ports kind of undermine that capability a bit ?

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Not necessarily the whole point, it's just a feature along with all of the Shield/Controller-optimized games. Besides, Half Life 2/Portal are something like 10 years old, it's not like they're porting current big-name titles or anything.

Streaming is all nice and dandy but native support always beats a stream. I'd say it's exciting to see Source ported over to Android, it's about time mobile platforms got to enjoy some of the major PC releases of the decade. Who knows, maybe other Source titles like Left 4 Dead or Counter Strike will follow? Everything depends on how these two will sell.

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I'm more excited about how the hackers will made all those exclusives less exclusive

Only problem I see is it being Shield exclusive. There's reason why there aren't SteamOS exclusive games: it's dumb as game should work just fine with any other device with enough power and same OS.
Android needs to be treated more like PC. Minimum requirements and graphical options menus, instead of device by device software testing and restrictions.

Then again these are pretty old games just being ported. How many will actually buy them more than out of curiosity. With portal maybe cross platform coop would work or if it were on other android devices then coop on the go, even better if workshop works.

I would like to buy my own Shield but still haven't found it anywhere where it would be reasonable priced after shipping. It's really hard to buy one within EU. Nexus 4 works like dream but Shields native system and touchscreen-to-key mapping just makes me want it. Fake bluetooth 360 controller just ain't the same ._.

Only problem I see is it being Shield exclusive. There's reason why there aren't SteamOS exclusive games: it's dumb as game should work just fine with any other device with enough power and same OS.
Android needs to be treated more like PC. Minimum requirements and graphical options menus, instead of device by device software testing and restrictions.

Then again these are pretty old games just being ported. How many will actually buy them more than out of curiosity. With portal maybe cross platform coop would work or if it were on other android devices then coop on the go, even better if workshop works.

I would like to buy my own Shield but still haven't found it anywhere where it would be reasonable priced after shipping. It's really hard to buy one within EU. Nexus 4 works like dream but Shields native system and touchscreen-to-key mapping just makes me want it. Fake bluetooth 360 controller just ain't the same ._.

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You missed the part where NVidia ported the games over themselves in-house, of course they want them exclusive on their device.

Yeah, This might finally be what it takes to make me actually finish Half Life 2 without being distracted.
I was thinking the shield limitation could be a little tricky because I think the shield has a few of its own exclusive keybinds like the ouya controller that you will need to map with something like tincore mapper.

You missed the part where NVidia ported the games over themselves in-house, of course they want them exclusive on their device.

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Other android devices have Nvidia Tegra as well, some games on Google Play at least had Tegra HD version. I'm almost certain if they don't use some weird framework hackers will be able to extract files anyway. Of course it makes some sense to market their own device but that device isn't even available outside US.

Other android devices have Nvidia Tegra as well, some games on Google Play at least had Tegra HD version. I'm almost certain if they don't use some weird framework hackers will be able to extract files anyway. Of course it makes some sense to market their own device but that device isn't even available outside US.

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I expect them to release the games on TegraZone eventually, but I'm not sure if it'd make a whole lot of sense to play them on devices with no physical input methods, plus knowing life they probably need pretty beefy handsets. I guess time will tell.